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Meta Optimizes Quest Developer Tool for Apple’s Mac M-series Chips

From roadtovr

Last week Meta released the latest version of the Meta Quest Developer Hub tool which has been optimized to work natively on Apple’s M-series chips for better performance.

The Meta Quest Developer Hub (MQDH) is a collection of tools to make VR development easier for Quest developers. In addition to giving devs an easy way to manage their headset and the files on it, it also provides access to Meta’s various VR SDKs, and includes tools to profiling and optimizing VR applications.

While MQDH has supported MacOS since it launched back in late 2020, the latest version v3.2, is just now getting around to supporting Apple’s modern M-series chips which the company uses in all of its most recent computers. The tool now has native support for the ARM64 architecture of the M-series chips, improving booting time and performance.

It’s a somewhat curious update considering this is the only major change in MQDH v3.2, and considering that VR developers working on MacOS seem to be a tiny minority compared to those on Windows.

There’s no telling exactly why Meta chose to do this now—rather than say, months if not years ago. Possibilities range from the insignificant (perhaps a handful of Meta’s internal VR devs work on Mac and wanted the extra performance) to the strategic (maybe Meta wants to improve the experience of Mac VR developers in an attempt to sway them away from Apple’s long-rumored headset.

Unreal Engine 5’s New Rendering Tech is Beginning to Make VR Look Startlingly Real

From roadtovr

Unreal Engine 5 brings two key features which stand to radically improve the realism of both 3D geometry and lighting. While the features aren’t yet fully optimized for VR, early developer experiments are showing impressive results.

Unreal Engine 5 launched earlier this year, but unfortunately its two new key features—Lumen for global illumination lighting and Nanite for micro-geometry—weren’t supported for VR out of the gate.

However, Epic has been working on subsequent versions of of Unreal Engine 5, and though they aren’t ready for a full release yet, preview builds of Unreal Engine 5.1 and 5.2 show that Lumen & Nanite have gained initial support for VR.

And while there’s still likely progress to be made to fully optimize the features for the level of performance required by VR headsets, developer have begun experimenting with Lumen & Nanite in VR and the results are already quite striking.

One such example comes from Twitter users Hiroyan which dropped themselves into a cave full of richly detailed objects and a flashlight to light up the space.

While many Lumen demos have focused on showing crazy glowing balls and highly reflective surfaces (as a clear example of what Lumen actually does), it’s actually this much more subtle use of the technologies that—to me, anyway—looks the most convincing from a realism standpoint.

The thing that really makes this scene stand out is the interplay between the highly detailed geometry and the lighting. VR really benefits from more detailed geometry not only because the stereoscopic view makes it readily apparent when small geometric details are actually faked (using tricks like normal mapping), but also because it’s so much easier and more common to get really close to objects when you’re playing in VR. Not only can you pick stuff up and hold it right up to your face, you can lean your head infinitely close to any surface.

Thanks to Nanite—which essentially functions like a continuous LOD system that draws detail from the original ‘master’ 3D model—the tiny surface details on the rocks and wood really stand out, especially because they’re real in terms of stereoscopic depth.

And thanks to that, the Lumen lighting system properly catches all of those small surface details and shines on them in a very convincing way that also subtly lights up the rest of the scene without pushing reflections to unrealistic levels simply for demonstration purposes.

“It’s hard to convey through screenshots, but it’s truly amazing when you’re able to get super close up to objects and they have micro detail you can see with your own eyes,” writes Hiroyan.

Images courtesy Hiroyan

While it will be awesome when this level of detail is possible on a basic VR ready PC, that might not happen for some time. Hiroyan says this demonstration was running on Nvidia’s RTX 3090, one of the highest-end GPUs the company makes.

VR Studio Releases Free Unity Development Framework for Building Rich VR Interactions

From roadtovr

Veteran enterprise VR studio VRMADA has released a public version of its VR toolset for quickly building immersive interactions for VR within Unity. Called UltimateXR, the studio says the tool is free and open source.

Our Guest Article by VRMADA CTO Enrique Tromp remains one of my favorites to this day because of how it shows the power of rich VR interactions. The problem, however, is that building rich interactions in VR (ie: interacting naturally and enjoyably with objects in the virtual world) is a painstaking process.

But VRMADA wants to make it easier and to that end has released UltimateXR, a development framework to build rich VR interactions in Unity.

Based on the studio’s own internal framework that’s been driven by the production of various VR projects, UltimateXR is free and open-source, allowing Unity developers of all stripes to more efficiently build rich interactions into their VR content.

UltimateXR supports Oculus, Pico, SteamVR, WaveXR, and WMR SDKs, and is comprised of 70 documented modules to do much of the heavy lifting required to build rich interactions in VR.

The framework primarily deals with creating avatars that can interact with the scene, interactive objects, and hand poses for realistic interaction with those objects.

Interactive objects in the UltimateXR sample scene | Image courtesy VRMADA

For instance, developers can use UltimateXR to create a full-body avatar with IK, define various points at which a single object can be grabbed, specify how an object can be manipulated once grabbed, and create the specific shapes that the user’s hand should make when grabbing the item in different ways.

Image courtesy VRMADA

Doing all of this from scratch can be painfully time consuming—and only grows in complexity as the number of interactive objects increases—which is one reason why rich object interactions in VR are rare.

The framework is available now at the UltimateXR website and the company says it plans to continue to evolve the framework as time goes on.